WikiLeaks Tightens Ties To Anonymous In Leak Of Stratfor Emails

The leaderless collective Anonymous once acted as WikiLeaks' vigilante avenger, attacking the secret-spilling group's enemies while WikiLeaks kept a careful remove from their offensives. But with the leak of a vast trove of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, Anonymous now says it's upgraded its relationship with WikiLeaks from friendly acquaintance to partner.

On Sunday night, WikiLeaks announced the initial release of what it's calling the Global Intelligence Files, a collection of 5.5 million emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor. The group claims those emails, to be released over the coming weeks, show Stratfor's involvement in operations like monitoring activists seeking redress for the Bhopal chemical disaster on behalf of Dow Chemical, payments to the former head of the controversial Pakistani secret service, and even the use of the company's information for insider trading.

WikiLeaks has partnered with 25 media organizations to sift, analyze and publish those emails: It lists Rolling Stone, the McClatchy News Agency, the Italian newspaper L'Espresso and the Indian paper The Hindu among them.

But more unusual is its other apparent partnership: Several mouthpieces for Anonymous say the hacker group gave WikiLeaks the leaked emails after a widely-publicized breach of the company's network in December of last year. The Anonymous twitter feeds Anonops and AnonymousIRC bothclaimed credit for the leak, and the Anonymous "news service" YourAnonnews spelled it out even more clearly: "To clarify to all journalists - YES, #Anonymous gave the STRATFOR emails obtained in the 2011 LulzXmas hack to WikiLeaks."

WikiLeaks, per its usual practice, won't comment on its source. But Wired.com reports that a coded tweet from WikiLeaks last December signaled the successful handoff of the files, which Anonops has identified as this one.

Publishing documents taken by Anonymous' digital intruders would represent a new level of collaboration between the two groups. When Anonymous launched attacks against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and others in retaliation against those companies' financial blockade against WikiLeaks last year, WikiLeaks kept a careful remove. “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks,” WikiLeaks' Icelandic spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson wrote at the time. “We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

When the Anonymous sub-group LulzSec hacked the security firm HBGary a few months later, exposing a proposed plan to sabotage WikiLeaks and intimidate its donors, WikiLeaks posted a PowerPoint presentation from the hacked documents on its site, but left it to Anonymous to publish the rest of the cache on its own site, AnonLeaks.

The Global Intelligence Files represent a far cozier relationship between the two groups, with WikiLeaks actively distributing and promoting the fruits of Anonymous' work. It's certainly not the first time that WikiLeaks has published documents that were explicitly hacked rather than leaked by an insider--its past publications have included the stolen "Climategate" emails from East Anglia University and the hacked emails of Sarah Palin. But since hitting the spotlight in 2010, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange has played down the group's associations with hacker and focused more on its role as a media organization and a conduit for whistleblowers.

A public association with a hacker group like Anonymous may hurt WikiLeaks' moral credibility just when the group needs it most. The group is struggling to raise cash and faces an ongoing grand jury investigation that could result in charges against members of the group. Its alleged source, Army private Bradley Manning, faces a trial for numerous charges including aiding the enemy, and prosecutors have hinted in his pre-trial hearing that Assange may have coached him on extracting classified documents from military networks.

On the other hand, a partnership with Anonymous could revive WikiLeaks' relevance to the public. Since September of 2010, the group hasn't had a functioning dropbox for leakers, and doesn't seem to have one in the works any time soon. With no public, secure conduit for whistleblowers, a massive collective of nameless hackers might be WikiLeaks' most prolific new source.

I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat fo...